Historian Richard Brooks asks what modern Portsmouth can learn from life in the Middle Ages. The star and crescent are ancient symbols of Portsmouth’s civic identity. They decorated the seal on the charter that brought [… read more ]
This is the first in a series of features in which local author and publisher Matt Wingett explores Portsmouth’s relationship to a long line of writers dating back to the Victorian era. In this issue, [… read more ]
When superstar fantast Neil Gaiman returned to his hometown of Portsmouth, Sarah Cheverton caught up with him for an exclusive interview. When I meet Neil Gaiman, he is sitting on a wooden bench by Canoe Lake [… read more ]
Local writer Gareth Rees gives a personal account of his meeting with Roddy, a recovering alcoholic he met while working in Portsmouth’s homeless shelter in the Eighties. I worked nights, seven in the evening to [… read more ]
Writer and academic Dave Allen shares his twin lifelong loves for local music and cricket, and explains how his own life story has dovetailed with the recent history of Portsmouth. I’m 65. I find it to be an age around which [… read more ]
During the early 1990s, Simon Sykes worked on Cultural Integration and Awareness Programmes for the Executive of the first ever Franco-British joint venture, which was based in Portsmouth. These diary extracts offer an insight into [… read more ]
Throughout his presidency, Nelson Mandela attended Johannesburg’s Park Lane Clinic where he got to know Tim Groom, a veteran nurse and anti-Apartheid campaigner who has since settled in Portsmouth. In this exclusive interview with Tom Sykes, Tim argues that [… read more ]
Tom Sykes has compiled quotes about Portsmouth that date back over two centuries. Some are complimentary, others not so much. ‘Portsmouth … is one of the world’s most astonishing natural harbours, rivalling even Valletta in [… read more ]
Richard Warburton has his preconceptions challenged by a beguiling exhibition of British artists’ reflections on the Spanish Civil War. Propped up on my desk is a reproduction of Miro’s small propaganda poster ‘Aidez l’Espagne’. Its [… read more ]
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